| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

María E. Argeri. De guerreros a delincuentes: La desarticulacíon de las jefaturas indígenas y el poder judicial; Norpatagonia, 1880–1930. (Colección tierra nueva e cielo nuevo, number 51.) Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. 2005. Pp. 331.

With this book, María E. Argeri has given historians of Argentina a gift. Her study of the spatial and human conquest of northern Patagonia, Argentina's "wild" hinterland, revises our understanding of the specifics of turn-of-the-century Argentine society and helps to correct some persistent misconceptions about Argentina's ethnic past and present. Ambitious in its conceptual scope, the book weaves together an unusually wide range of primary sources, theoretical frameworks, and original thinking. It describes in detail the implementation of the means of social control by the state in the Patagonian states of Rio Negro, Chubut, and Santa Cruz—an area traditionally seen as chaotic, disorderly, and "barbaric"—through both military violence and the imposition of law and other discursive means. This process of forced imposition of oppressive control in northern Patagonia, and the legal/judicial basis for maintaining that control, continued, as Argeri shows, long after the notorious "Conquest of the Desert" of 1879–1880. The state's goal at the turn of the last century, according to Argeri, was to enforce by severe and patriarchal means an imagined state of homogeneity in which the Araucanos and other indigenous groups were absorbed to the point of extinction. The "invisibility" of native groups, on the one hand, and the supposed homogeneity and European origin of Argentina's population, on the other, are myths that persist to this day, but Argeri's book helps to explode both.

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